posts brought to you by the category “pkd”

Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database
table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life.
What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated
with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it
will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun
way to find stuff.

Bob DuCharme : Datatype Checking with XSLT 2.0

There's actually some good, even if ironic, news about data typing
support in XSLT 2.0: if you're still using DTDs, and you're putting
off a move to any schema format, you can use XSLT 2.0 stylesheets to
add datatype checking to your system, further postponing a move to
schemas.

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Jon Udell : The Document is the Database

It's handy that the "database" is a self-contained package that
can be updated using any text editor, emailed, read directly from a
file system, or served by any web server. But it's awkward to share
the work of updating with other people or to isolate and edit parts
of the file as it grows. When we convert to a database-backed web
application in order to solve these problems, we trade away the
convenience of the file-oriented approach. Can we have our cake and
eat it too?

I am experimenting with something like this
for the
shiny
new weblog format
(yeah, yeah, I know the public identifier is wrong.) My concern, right
now, is how painful it will be to generate index files for categories
parsing ~ 5000 files with
File::Find::Rule::XPath
.

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Is it my imagination or are we having interchange arguments

about interchange formats? I confess I have
only half been paying attention to the current bitch-fest surrounding
RSS. I have been travelling and so my own personal fury has been
occupied learning to hate people who drive mini-vans, wondering why
Americans are so clue-less about using their turn signals and trying to
think of some karmic justice for the asshole who managed to get the
idea for
cinnamon sticky bun
flavoured coffee out of the boardroom and in to gas stations. (Look,
it's not like I have any illusions about gas station coffee but some
things are just wrong.) But comparing any flavour of the RSS format to
the
.doc
seems a bit disingenuous. The whole point of this magic magic XML
stuff, I thought, was that we didn't have to spend all this time
arguing whether or not you spell
labour
with a
u
. You say labor, I say labour and we write computer programs to deal
with it.

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Zeldman : "Over a year later we're still waiting for the W3C to
take the hint."

I'm guessing that Jeffrey's heart is in the
right place, but you would think that in a year's time he could have
put together a list of suggestions and sent it to the W3C. To that end,
I will direct people's attention to the
Class::Phrasebook
Perl module which defined a simple, bare-bones XML format for
describing, well, phrases. I am using this (albeit with a custom
Class::Phrasebook::Simple class which I'll release soon) for the
backend at the
W3QC
where we are generating all manner of documents in all manner of
languages and the last thing I want to deal with is the phraseology
(what an ugly word) of the &lt;h3> element describing the
articles someone has written. I'm pretty sure that if the nice
propellor heads at the W3C had some way of writing this...

# This is Perl but the point is that the source
# document is XML so the code could be anything
use Class::Phrasebook::Simple qw (:errors);
warn Class::Phrasebook::Simple->errors("general","io-error");

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M-J Milloy on donut-eating surrender monkeys

So tomorrow morning, a horde of Quebeckers will be enjoying
something uniquely Quebecois, redeveloped, industrialized and
popularised by a Southern donut chain. How distinctly Canadian -- or,
at least as Canadian as the products of that other chain, owned by
Americans, named after an American who played hockey for an American
hockey team.

Ken Y. Clark : SQL::Translator.pm

This module attempts to simplify the task of converting one
database create syntax to another through the use of Parsers (which
understand the source format) and Producers (which understand the
destination format).

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First Monday : Digitizing Old Photographs for the Web

Some are private photographs, images of family life. Others are
public photographs. Of course, as Roland Barthes (1981) observed in
Camera Lucida, even with public photographs we tend to provide a
private reading: "Does that train still run through our town?" "How
old was I when that happened?" We link images to our own
existence.

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Now, I've never really been one for conceptual art

but unlike the esteemed Mr. Kimmelman I
thought this was pretty interesting and daring piece of work. Of
course, it was sort of deflated by the knowledge that the artist was
too dense or too naive to have
never imagined what would happen
by leaving the pieces in the subway. Well, duh. What the hell else was
the point, you ninny? To take some clever Gap-ad photos to show your
class-mates? Anyway, shouldn't the word "straphangers" [sic] be
hyphenated?

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From the "A day without hyperbole is a day without sun"
department:

Those people deserve no truck. They should be argued with,
bickered and brow-beat in to submission. As well-meaning as those
people may be they are simply wrong. It is a rationale that is so
myopic and of such staggering laziness and dim-witted selfishness
that I doubt any one with half a sense about them could reasonably
defend it when given even a lick of scrutiny.

Me, on the notion that one's opinion is
somehow value-added by one's consumer purchases.

license

I was cleaning my studio this afternoon

and I opened, for the first time, the top
drawer to a small cabinet that the previous occupant had left behind.
It was empty except for a single fridge-poetry magnet that looked up at
me and said: Lust.

license

Me : Log::Dispatch::Jabber.pm 0.3

Added hooks to optionally check a user's
presence before sending a message; sorta-kinda fixed the bug that
prevented messages from being sent to multiple recipients. The CPAN
listings haven't been updated so you can grab a copy
over here
. see also :
docs

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Emacs package for talking to a dictionary server

As my primary working environment is Emacs 21, I decided to write an
Emacs-Lisp package for accessing this dictionary server. The older
webster.el didn't work with the newer protocol. After starting the
implementation I was pointed to an already existing implementation, but
this was basically a wrapper to the dict client program and didn't have
all the features I wanted and have now been implemented in this
dictionary client.

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Arundhati Roy : Not Again

Close to one year after the war against terror was officially
flagged off in the ruins of Afghanistan, in country after country
freedoms are being curtailed in the name of protecting freedom, civil
liberties are being suspended in the name of protecting democracy.
All kinds of dissent is being defined as "terrorism". Donald Rumsfeld
said that his mission in the war against terror was to persuade the
world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life.
When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their
quarters. So, it's hard for me to say this, but the American way of
life is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn't acknowledge that
there is a world beyond America.

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The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : opportune

opportune adj 1: suitable or at a time that is suitable or
advantageous especially for a particular purpose; "an opportune place
to make camp"; "an opportune arrival" [ant: {inopportune}] 2: at a
convenient or suitable time; "an opportune time to receive guests"
[syn: {favorable}, {favourable}]
wn

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N.Y. Times : The Brave New Kitchen (No Room for Cooking)

"I studied [the design] a long time before
saying: "It's beautiful. But where do we put the ugly stuff?" There was
no place in this clever kitchen for a trash can. And yet cooking is all
about garbage. Garbage for a good cause, but garbage nonetheless. Our
hired genius wound up designing a clever slot under a counter alongside
the stove, the perfect solution in a kitchen that still feels perfect 10
years later. Still, I think of that oversight whenever I hear the words
"architect" and "food" in a single sentence."

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"They told us CBC Radio doesn't create enough buzz.

They want a radio service that has people talking
around the water cooler."
As happy as I am to see Sheilagh "You're so
sweet, you make my teeth hurt" Rogers get the axe, it sounds like the CBC
brass is off on a
120 second
goosechase. Last month, I wrote a letter to the staff at WBUR's
The Connection
that, more or less, sums it up for me :

For 18 months I lived on Martha's Vineyard and pined for the CBC,
every day feeling grateful for the advent of Internet radio.

Eventually, I moved back to Montreal and life was good. I remember
hearing the announcement that Dick Gordon was leaving the CBC to assume
hosting duties at The Connection and thinking it was "our" loss.

[Even] before his departure, Sheilagh Rogers had taken over the
flagship morning show, on Radio One. Long story short, I simply can't
stand to listen to her. My only solace has been to write increasingly
venomous letters whenever she and the production staff fall prey to a
pique of especially sugary and empathetic nonsense. Not a happy
situation any way you look at it.

But over Thanksgiving, driving down to the Island, we were stuck in
traffic on Storrow Drive and I was fiddling with the radio dial and I
heard Dick Gordon interviewing Alastair McCloud.

And once again, every day I am grateful for the advent of Internet
radio.

You guys rock. You have no idea how happy it makes me to find an
intelligent radio program, broadcast daily, with a serious host and
interesting guests.

And for someone who moved back to Montreal partly because it is,
seemingly, the only place to find a decent baguette on the whole
continent [an entire] hour devoted to bread is like manna from
heaven.

Meanwhile, did you ever think you'd live to see a member of the CRAP
party say : "[
The
House
is] exactly the sort of programming the publicly funded broadcaster
should be doing." ?

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that I wrote as an appendix to one of their
upcoming books. It needed a bit of fixup for AxKit publishing (as the
original is in POD, ugh!), so there may be some buggettes here and there
(like the fact that footnotes aren't linked up yet), but it should be
fairly useful to new users."

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Margaret Visser : "Every burger is as self-contained, as
streamlined

and as replete as a flying saucer, and just as
unmistakably a child of the modern imagination."
I'm pretty sure the author is talking
gibberish but what a great sentence! We should all endeavour to be "as
replete as flying saucers".

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The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is tenet

| source : web1913 | Tenet \Ten"et\, n. [L. tenet
he holds, fr. tenere to hold. See {Tenable}.] Any opinion, principle,
dogma, belief, or doctrine, which a person holds or maintains as true;
as, the tenets of Plato or of Cicero. That al animals of the land are in
their kind in the sea, . . . is a tenet very questionable. --Sir T.
Browne. The religious tenets of his family he had early renounced with
contempt. --Macaulay. Syn: Dogma; doctrine; opinion; principle; position.
See {Dogma}. | source : wn | tenet n : a religious doctrine that is
proclaimed as true without proof [syn: {belief}, {dogma}]

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It is terrifying to realize we are all on our
own, down here in the land of the mortals. But sooner or later, we have
to grow up and look after ourselves, cherishing what is good in our
dreams and bracing for the nightmares that must come, from inside as well
as outside."

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"For several years now, I've been using FreeBSD
on my laptop at work. Since I am often at different customer sites on any
given day, I must adjust my laptop settings according to their network,
which means a new IP address, new name server, new default gateway and so
on. Editing rc.conf, resolv.conf and friends by hand was tedious. I
needed something that was easy to set up, use, develop and maintain."

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Simson Garfinkel : Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is
it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically
monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can
strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

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This is not a time for shooting first and asking questions
later.

The attacks on the World Trade Center, and
the Pentagon, may turn out be the work of a well-financed,
well-organized and well-informed international terrorist group. The
U.S. may find itself at war, yet. It is important to remember, though,
that either statement may also prove to be untrue. Despite the fact
that the media keeps yammering on about a modern-day SMERSH stalking
the planet, it doesn't sound like these attacks required a whole lot of
sophistication beyond the ability to fly an airplane. How complicated
can it be to plan this sort of attack? Even before the advent of the
Internet, and on-tap information, you could have ballparked this with a
map, dead-tree airline schedules and the most pedestrian of specifics
concerning an airplane. I couldn't tell you how to sneak a matte knife
past airport scanners but given the fact that Western news programs
have been doing the same with actual guns, for years now, it can't be
very complicated. Where you learn to fly a passenger jet low enough to
hit a six-story building, without bailing in the process, is something
that continues to escapes me. That, and the willingness to fly a plane
full of people into a building full of people. And if the U.S. is "at
war", as people are saying then they are at war with a shadow. Ask
yourself, how you can be at war with everyone and no one at the same
time. Ask yourself what the consequences are of living your life that
way. Ask yourself if you really want to live in "Fortress America". Ask
yourself, as Americans, how you are going to go to "war", or mete out
justice, if it turns out that this was the work of other Americans. I
am not trying to minimize what has happened. I may well be wrong on
both counts. Either way, the whole situation just plain sucks beyond
comprehension. There is little question that retribution will be
visited on those responsible, and it will be awful -- small consolation
-- but lashing out in blind anger and panic accomplishes nothing. I
guess my point is that, while extraordinary, it is not outside the
realm of the possible that this could have been carried out by "a few
guys". And I'm really not sure how you fight against that which makes
it all the more terrifying. Dubya's plan to wage a long and expensive
war against an unseen enemy is little more than smoke and mirrors or,
if you're inclined to believe that sort of thing, a slippery slope like
you've never seen before. see also :
How Good Were the [WTC] Pilots?
via
rebecca's
pocket

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Andreas Bolka : XML-RPC to POP3 API

"describes a relatively straight-forward approach
to an XML-RPC to POP3 gateway. The goal is to enable POP3 access to all
environments supporting XML-RPC. This API also introduces a (to the
XML-RPC community) - as far as I know - new authentication system. An
authentication call returns a session id (called SID) which is used to
authenticate successive calls. Commonly this is done by providing a SID
param with successive calls. The following API approaches this problem by
providing the authenticated functions under a method namespace containing
the SID and therefore only accessible to the authenticated client during
one session."

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Steve Mann : Computer Architectures For Personal Space

"I always found it strange why individuals so
willingly acquiesce to the mechanized invasions of privacy caused by
video surveillance, yet the same people become angered when overtly
photographed by an individual wielding a handheld camera. To resolve this
seemingly strange paradox, I have experimented with making myself into a
corporation, with its own body-worn video surveillance cameras, for the
protection of its body's property. What I have learned is that if I can
abandon (or appear to abandon) my autonomy, by becoming a corporation, I
have much greater freedom. In particular, I discovered that if I am bound
by external forces of policy and procedure (as is typical of a
corporation), I can be, in some ways, much more free."

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Cary Tennis : "A drunk hides nothing from another drunk. So when I
look at Bush,

I don't see a conservative Republican, a flirter
with the Christian right, a Texas oilman, a son of political royalty. I
see a guy like me who never wants to quit, who has an infinite thirst and
an infinite appetite for whatever you've got and who, if he could, would
drink up the whole room and then tear it apart looking for more. I see a
guy barely containing a murderous contempt for anyone who doesn't drink
like he does; I see a guy who has to pause when answering questions not
because there's nothing in his head but because there's too much in his
head and most of it is vile and the rest is obscene; no doubt the first
thing that pops into his head when asked a question at a press conference
is "You have the face of a barnyard animal" or "I'd like to fuck you
silly." That apparent blankness, as though his brain is having a rolling
blackout, is actually a sign that he's sorting, looking for an answer
that's both true and bland, something that won't set off any alarms,
something that will satisfy his need to tell the truth yet not give in to
the grandiose and contemptuous impulses so familiar to alcoholics far and
wide."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Eileen Myles
reports that :
In the way
that Bill Clinton was our first black president, Spielberg has given us
our first butch lesbian hero.
Truly, nothing is what it seems anymore.

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Tina Mion : Virtual Election

"Tina and her friends held elaborate ceremonies
every Sunday to select one card from the Presidential bridge deck. Mion
then created an original painting of the figure represented on the card,
maintaining the card's face value and suit. The paintings were created
using a wide variety of styles and mediums inspired by the personalities
and periods in which the figures lived." see also :
Morning
Edition on Mion's portraits of U.S. first ladies
.

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Andy Mackay : DocBrowser

"The eventual aim of this product is to able to
slurp an entire static html tree (including images) to "Zopify" a site.
At the moment this release allows you to slurp a whole bunch of files off
the file system and creates Zope objects in the same structure."

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I'm going to stick my finger in the pie

and ask why it is that people bother to put the
slides from presentations they've given online? Divorced from their
presenter, and that which is being discussed, they tend to read like a
cross between poetry fridge magnets and the transcript to a
buzzword-bingo game. I think a good classroom exercise would be to see
how many different presentations could be concocted using one set of
slides a starting point.

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Looking for a change?

Maybe you should try a
Cheese Choc-Dog
for lunch. How could you resist a recipe that requires you : "carefully
drill each hot dog lengthwise" and then "fill the cavaties with aerosol
cheese product." Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my chin...

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Whenever I see stuff like this, it makes me
think of the trip I took to the Valley with J.P. and friends in his
dusty orange microbus. We stopped in New Minas (?) for the obligatory
trip to Frenchy's. J.P. discovered two dozen head-sized Fozie bears
which soon found a new home in any available window space on the bus.
They were a big hit at the vegetable stand where we bought almost as
many pumpkins to keep the bears company.

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MP3PVM (read distributed MP3 encoding)

This one comes via the nice people at
Ars Technica
who have this to say on the subject : '[T]he idea is that you can use
this program to encode mp3s using multiple computers in much the same way
that Setiathome and RC5 do. Is this really worthwhile? Probably not, but
it's definitely cool."

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Salon

"The United States foists itself onto its
northern neighbor in many areas, from clothing fashions to household
items and our megalithic entertainment industry. And now, according to
the National Post business magazine, a new cross-cultural market has
emerged -- the "jizz biz." By one estimate, Canada now imports $3 million
worth of American sperm each year." Meanwhile, the National Post is also
reporting that
hot
helmets induce hockey violence
. Seriously, though, who can resist a quote like "A lot of your stress is
actually arising from thermoregulatory conflict."

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Lydia Pallas Loren : The Purpose of Copyright

"[T]he conclusion that a greater numbers of works
will be created when there are greater monopolies fails to account for
the negative implications of broad monopolies on creative expression.
When the scope of the copyright monopoly becomes too great, the creation
of new works is, itself, hampered. After all, each creator of a new work
builds in some way on the works of the past. With overly broad
monopolies, new works that build upon old are not created, creativity is
stifled, and thus the net value to society is lessened. We have, what
Judge Walker referred to a 'monopolistic stagnation.'"

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Lewis MacKenzie : It's not enough to say you're sorry

"I raise this somewhat embarrassing UN
shortcoming to temper the understandable expectation that we learn from
our mistakes, a theme repeated much too often in both the Srebrenica and
Rwandan reports. These two disasters for the UN were not mistakes. They
unfolded as the result of calculated decisions by the Security Council
not to get involved in sorting out someone else's problems, where there
was no identifiable shared national self-interests within the permanent
five members, or where the risk of casualties was considered too high.
These same types of situations will happen again and again, so we might
as well get used to the guilt that accompanies our chronically inadequate
response."

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Tony Quinn

"There is nothing that the U.S. government has
done to bring about our new wealth. From a California perspective,
Washington is almost a foreign capital, almost another government. We
look upon ourselves as a nation-state. We are more than one out of 50."
Duh, can somebody say
DARPA
? I always get a big kick asking Americans Against Taxes (I know I know)
who they think pays for, what are truly are, the best roads on the
planet.

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NY Times on the Mother Jones of Silicon Valley

"Why do I spend so much time in the heart of this
new economy working with unions to build a voice for working people?" she
said. "It has everything to do with whether we can revitalize an
institution that so many people in this country depend on. It's the only
vehicle in this country that can balance the political landscape."

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City of Montreal : Top 10 Garbage Crimes

In the last 30 years, Montreal has had three
mayors. The first built the &lt;a href =
"http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/panoramas/refvdm/to.mov"&gt;Olympic
stadium&lt;/a&gt;. The second spent $1M to rewire the cross on
&lt;a href =
"http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/panoramas/belvedere/98nov/mtl13.mov"&gt;the
mountain&lt;/a&gt; with fiber-optics so that it will turn purple
when the Pope dies. Finally, we have a guy who got elected on a platform
of doing nothing but planting &lt;a href =
"http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/mtl-hiroshima/expo-mtl/quicktimevr/refvdm/jjv2h.mov"&gt;lots
of flowers&lt;/a&gt; and who now wants to fine people 500$ if
their garbage bags are too small. I can't wait to go home!

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Morning Edition talks to the Anti-Ironist

I was lying in bed, half asleep ,when I heard
this and it nearly ruined my day. I will read this guy's book. I'd like
to believe he has something to say beyond all the happy-happy joy-joy
platitudes I've heard so far. Mostly though, I'm just waiting for him to
start handing out Kool-Aid. real audio.

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wtf?

dude, where's my car

This document uses
CSS
kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its
contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the
content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it
shouldn't be an issue.

On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a
browser with incomplete
CSS
and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to
mind.

It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and
I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one
browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they
will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some
later date.

On the other hand, if something is down-right
unreadable
please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.

yes, we have no bananas

This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's
just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I
rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old
stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through
the cracks.